


and we're never gonna survive (unless)

by Emmar



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Aromantic Character, Asexual Spectrum Character, Bisexual Character, Multi, Nonbinary Character, Trans Male Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-04
Updated: 2015-04-04
Packaged: 2018-03-21 06:35:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,199
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3681690
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Emmar/pseuds/Emmar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On grief, falling apart and falling together, malleability and joy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	and we're never gonna survive (unless)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cloudrains](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cloudrains/gifts).



> This is entirely the fault of Elliot queermarauders, to whom this fic is a gift. Ask for queer, fun, angsty Remadora and ye shall receive, apparently. Nonbinary demiromantic aceflux Tonks, trans heteroromantic bisexual Remus, cis aromantic homosexual Sirius.
> 
> (I have no idea what Molly and Arthur's ages are in canon. I also don't particularly care.)

“Your little cousin is staring at me,” Remus murmurs into his mug, and Sirius snorts a laugh.  
“Remus,” he says, in that tone of his that means he thinks Remus has missed something incredibly obvious. He’s right about half the time, so Remus puts up with it. “I know I’m not terribly observant as regards people, but even I can see that if she didn’t think you’d leg it, Dora would be about two seconds away from pinning you against the nearest wall and having her wicked way with you.”  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Remus says after a moment, stunned, mug hovering uncertainly halfway between the table and his mouth.  
“Honest! Cross my heart. She wants to jump you. Real bad. Might even be some of those gross _feelings_ involved, who knows?”

Sirius’ tone is so deadpan that Remus stares at him blankly a moment longer before putting his mug down and pinching his best friend hard on the wrist.

“Oi! What was that for?”  
“On principle. Anyway, aren’t I a little old for her?”  
“My friend,” Sirius says grandly, sweeping his arms out dramatically and making Remus duck, “this may come as a surprise to you, but you are in fact _only thirty-five_. As life expectancies go, even with your furry little problem you’re still a third of the way through at _most_.”  
“That’s not really the point I was making,” Remus tells him dryly, and Sirius makes a rude noise in the back of his throat.  
“Molly!” he says, leaning back in his chair to face Molly Weasley, who looks up from the stove with her eyebrows raised.  
“Yes, Sirius?”  
“How much older than Arthur are you? I’m proving a point to Remus.”  
“Oh, eight years, closer to nine.”  
“See!” Sirius crows, triumphant, pointing so fiercely he nearly takes one of Remus’ eyes out. “Too old my _arse_.”  
“Too old for whom, exactly?” says Molly, and there’s a look on her face that Sirius clearly doesn’t recognise at all, but Remus remembers well from his own childhood, and he can’t help the way he colours.  
“My little cousin Dora, of course!” Sirius informs her, and Molly makes a quiet, thoughtful noise.  
“I can’t say I’d call the two of you suited, but there’s no denying you’re a handsome man, Remus Lupin, and she’d be a fool not to want you.”

Remus, mortified, focuses his gaze on the grain of the table and somewhere behind him in the hallway something crashes to the floor and Walburga Black’s portrait begins to shriek.

“Bugger,” says Sirius. “Well, if you’re going to be a big ol’ baby about Dora, does that mean I get to keep you as my toyboy a while longer?”

Remus chokes on a laugh and Molly Weasley throws her head back, a fuller, dirtier laugh than one might expect emerging from her throat; but in retrospect, not so much, he realises. There was probably a lot of practice involved in those six pregnancies, after all.

“Yes, you great lump,” he says after a moment, and Sirius grins and plants a filthy kiss on him, just in time to give Snape an eyeful.

\---

 _A while longer_ transpires to be the space between Christmas and the middle of June, when everything goes so terribly, terribly wrong.

Grimmauld Place is oppressive, hollow and crushing, in the absence of Sirius, and the lack of warmth in his bed is the least of Remus’ trouble. Tonks begins to push closer, and he shies away not because he’s too old, as he says, or too inhuman, or even that he feels as though he’s betraying Sirius, because Sirius would tell him to take what he could get and be grateful, because Sirius thought romance was for idealists and waiting for it was for fools.

No, he shies away from Tonks because he has too many secrets and only one that is now his alone, barring Poppy Pomfrey, who rarely ventures into Grimmauld Place if she can help it anyway. He remembers with perfect clarity the moment James, Sirius and Peter had cornered him and told him they knew about his furry little problem, and thinking that thank god _that_ was the secret they’d worked out for themselves.

Of course, six months later Sirius had stuck his hand down the front of Remus’ trousers for the first time and said only, “Huh,” and set about learning his way around a vagina as well as he already knew it around a penis.

It’s not that he doesn’t think Tonks will be as adaptable, but Sirius’ particular brand of disregard for things others consider important was a quality quite unique to him. So Remus shies away.

His resolve holds for longer than he expects it to, almost the whole summer; the Weasley twins start popping around again once their shop is well and truly going, and they’ve clearly decided that playing pranks is the best way to cheer people up in this dreary house.

Remus decides he ought to remind them exactly who they’re sharing a house with.

The prank war escalates and around August they all three realise they’re not alone when a freak salt-storm targets them over lunch and they trade stunned looks. Tonks looks far too pleased with herself and Remus wastes no time in silently summoning her plate towards himself, grinning as her awkward grab for it puts her elbow in Snape’s soup. It devolves into something between a food fight and a fist fight, when Tonks trips over her own feet and manages to trip one of the twins in the process. It all goes downhill from there, and at some point someone grabs Remus’ ankle and he goes down with a shriek, and lands not on the floor but on _Tonks_ , face burning.

“Sorry,” he says, breathing hard, and she grins up at him, blushing right across her cheekbones and up into her hair, staining the mousy brown red. She stares him right in the eye as she props herself on her elbows, moving slowly enough for him to retreat, and when he doesn’t, she kisses him, a firm press of lips with the promise of more.

Then she elbows him in the ribs and conjures a jet of water that hits one of the twins square in the ear.

\---

They learn each other slowly, with the keen joy of adolescents but the quiet certainty of adults. Some days they undress languidly, some days they barely undress at all. Sometimes Remus finds things familiar to his own body and sometimes things familiar from Sirius’. Some days, he puts his hand down her trousers and finds only skin stretched smooth over bone, and they lay about trading lazy kisses like teenagers or trawling through Sirius’ old collection of muggle records.

“Do you think,” she says one afternoon, “we might have a kid, one day?”  
“Can we?” he asks, putting aside the issue of his furry little problem.  
“The change of shape is absolute, you know.”  
“Huh.”  
  
(Eighteen months later, he reaches out for his wife’s hand and wishes they could watch their son grow up. But Teddy will not grow up alone the way his godfather did, and that is almost enough.)


End file.
